I live well out in the rural hinterlands of Ireland. Folk memory is long lived and some traditional farming practices tend to border on folk magic. One such custom that can still be found is to put an predator's carcass on display to warn off other of its species not to prey on herd animals - sheep and chickens. I have known pine martin to be nailed up on chicken coops as a warning. Walking our dogs down our lane I saw a road kill fox draped over the pasture's fence post. It's a form of sympathetic magic. And it is deep, deep in our cellular memory. Sympathetic magic is imitative magic or correspondences according to anthropologists. You don't have to be identified as pagan to practice it.

Yule being the microcosm of the coming year, we have it from the ancestors that it's a good time to take precautions, what in Anthropologist they would call apotropaic (literally, “turning away, averting”) behavior.

So if in Ukraine you look under the table while enjoying the Thirteen-Course Midwinter's Eve feast (one course for each moon of the coming year), you'll see some unusual things.

“Mother Night”: a resonant name. Midwinter's Eve: the night that gives birth to the rest of the year.

To the Hwicce, the Anglo-Saxon tribe ancestral (some say) to today's witches, it was Módraniht: the Night of the Mothers. Anglo-Saxonist Philip A. Shaw relates this to the Germanic cult of the Matronae, attested on the Continent in more than 1000 inscriptions (Shaw 41). Many contemporary heathens accordingly offer to the dísir (female elves) and human foremothers at Midwinter.

The phrase (in the singular) entered modern English by way of Kurt Vonnegut's 1961 novel of the same name, the tale of a Nazi collaborator, which took its title from Goethe's Faust (1:3). “I am part of the part that was everything in the beginning,” Mephistopheles tells Faust, “part of the darkness that gave birth to light: light that in its arrogance challenges Mother Night [Mutternacht] and claims the possession of space” (Fairley 21).

Mother Night: the Void, the Primal Darkness. “Diana was the first created before all creation,” says Charles G. Leland in Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches. “In her were all things; out of herself, the first darkness, she divided herself; into darkness and light she was divided. Lucifer, her brother and son, herself and her other half, was the light” (Leland 18).